What if protonmail, gmail or whatever email provider you are using goes belly-up? Are all your accounts doomed?

If so, what are some preventive measures? Adding backup emails to your registered accounts?

  • xigoi@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    37·
    6 months ago

    Buy your own domain and use it for e-mails (there are many providers that support custom domains). If your provider shuts down, just switch to a different one and keep the same address.

    • howrar@lemmy.ca
      10·
      6 months ago

      This isn’t without its own problems. If you fail to renew your domain and someone else picks it up, they now have access to all your accounts. At least with a popular provider like Gmail, they don’t allow emails to be reused, and if they ever discontinue email services and drop the gmail.com domain, everyone will know about it and know that password reset requests should not be sent to these emails.

      • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comEnglish
        1·
        6 months ago

        This is a terrible argument, IMO. Domains are almost always auto renew, and there are typically grace periods.

    • Mike Wooskey@lemmy.thewooskeys.comEnglish
      7·
      6 months ago

      Using your own domain definitely makes it easy to get back up by just switching providers. But what about all your historical emails? If your original provider goes poof, what’s the plan? I connect via IMAP, so all my emails are stored on the provider’s servers, right? Or do email apps keep local copies, too?

      Are there backup services for emails? I seem to recall Outlook having some kind of archive feature (I haven’t used outlook in decades), but I think I remember it was only recoverable in outlook and even then, it was a pain to search for a particular email.